HICCS 2025

This panel examines the interplay of politics and society in modern China, exploring collaboration and colonialism in Tibetan grasslands during early Maoist rule, the origins of Red Guard factionalism during the Cultural Revolution, and the symbolic role of automobiles in China's early industrialization.

Benno Weiner
Carnegie Mellon University, Associate Professor

Title:
Collaboration and Colonialism on the Tibetan Grasslands of Early-Maoist China: The Political Lives of a Patriotic Nationality Representative

Abstract:
Among the thorniest issues historians face when researching non-Han communities during the Maoist period is evaluating the political lives and legacies of members of the pre-1949 traditional elite who after 1949 were enlisted into the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front (tongyi zhanxian). These were people who under different circumstances would have been targeted by the new regime as class enemies. Instead, they were christened “patriotic nationality representatives” (aiguo minzu daibiao) and given positions as leaders of local and regional “nationality autonomous areas.” I have written about the Party’s ideological justification for opting, at least for a time, to preserve and promote non-Han indigenous elites (2020, 2023). Acting both as agents of the new state and through the charismatic authority of their indigenous positions, these figures would prove pivotal in the establishment CCP power across non-Han borderlands in the early years of the People’s Republic.
Borrowing from theorists of colonial collaboration such as Ronald Robinson’s “excentric idea of imperialism” (1986) and Uradyn Bulag’s notion of “collaborative nationalism” (2010), this paper explores the contemporary decisions made by one Tibetan “patriotic nationality representative” as a grassroots vantage point from which to consider the complex interplay of agency, belief, coercion, and resistance within a colonial setting that masked itself both through a transformative ideology and by demands for the active political participation of the colonized. Gélek Gyatso (1920-1969, T. gde legs rgya mtsho, C. Gelei Jiacuo) was a locally prominent monk-official from contemporary Qinghai province in the region Tibetan speakers refer to as Amdo. Most of what is known about Gélek Gyatso comes from official Chinese-language sources published in the 1990s and early 2000s that celebrate his life as an exemplary United Front figure. Unlike most of his contemporaries, however, Gélek Gyatso left a spotty but revealing archival footprint which suggests a more complex political subjectivity. Augmented by insights drawn from other regionally prominent United Front figures, this paper
considers a range of possible interpretations for the actions of Gélek Gyatso and other traditional elites in Amdo and beyond when confronted with unprecedented challenges but also new opportunities presented by incorporation into an extraordinarily interventionist, transformative, and ultimately colonial state power.
(Refer to the speaker's profile page for full abstract)

Jun Yang
Academy of History and Documentationnof Socialism, Department of History, East China Normal University, Junior Fellow and Assistant Researcher

Title:
Rethinking the Origins of Red Guard Factionalism in Beijing’s High Schools: Three Cases Studies at the First
Two Months of Cultural Revolution

Abstract:
Existing literature on the evolution of the Red Guards movement has highlighted opposing factions that violently fought against one another and produced sociological and political interpretations to explain mass factionalism. Despite significant differences, researchers generally attribute factionalism to the debates over the so-called “blood-line theory” in the late summer of 1966. However, this attribution has tended to inadvertently reproduce certain key features of the Red Guards’ own political understanding at the time. My research seeks to reconsider established interpretations of Red Guard factionalism by examining three long-neglected high schools (Beijing Normal High, Girls’ High and No. 65), which played critical roles in the early Red Guard movement. Utilizing newly available sources, this paper will focus on the role of party officials’ work teams in these schools and argue that by dividing students based on family class status and initiating antagonisms that pitted some against others, work teams had amplified fissures that already existed on campus and later exploded into factionalism in the schools. Following their abrupt withdrawal, students previously supported by work teams continued to use similar tactics for igniting the violent “blood-line” debate in the society at large. Thereby, the students activated preexisting interests and orientations rooted in entrenched social and political cleavages in China’s state-socialist regime. At the same time, Red Guard factionalism and movement developed and expanded from high school campuses to the society.

Chuan Wang
University of Alabama, Full-Time Instructor

Title:
Political Symbols on Wheels: The Role of Automobiles in Early Auto Industrialization in China

Abstract:
While acknowledging the vulnerable industrial foundation left after the civil war, the CCP began to build an independent automobile industry in the early 1950s. These initial years' car manufacturing was primarily a means to fulfill its path to heavy industrialization, which followed the Soviet Union’s model. Motor vehicles like trucks produced were primarily for logistical purposes, thereby preparing for potential warfare. However, this industrialization strategy did not readily introduce passenger cars to the Chinese people. While an independent automobile industry had contributed to the CCP’s industrialization and modernization, it had little connection with everyday mobility. Meanwhile, China issued the household registration system in 1958 to formally restrict population mobilization. In this paper, I argue that at a time when mobility was slow and restrictive, cars paradoxically became a political symbol of the party cadre’s socio-economic privilege and the CCP’s ultimate power. On the one hand, the missing connection between the car and the people, or simply put, the lack of a “people’s car” in the Mao period, demonstrates the CCP’s designer’s role in China’s automobility system. On the other hand, the role of the automobile remained open to redefinition as cars began to enter the everyday lives of the Chinese people.